Friends and foes are wondering if Mr Miliband has lost the plot

If Labour persists with nursery school politics, the party is heading for
defeat at the polls

Miracle Mike was a wonder of the poultry world. Hatched in Colorado in 1945, he survived a botched attempt to behead him, retaining enough of his faculties to perch, walk, preen and make lucrative guest appearances as Mike the Headless Chicken. The Labour Party, nervy and disoriented, is also suffering a malaise that its critics might define as decapitated fowl syndrome.

With the leader and the shadow chancellor away on holiday, Labour’s prolonged roosting session, punctuated by faint clucking, gave rise to the accusation that the party – if you will forgive the horrible pun – is displaying all the characteristics of an Edless chicken. While a summer lull was bound to elicit murmurings from malcontents, senior figures loyal to Ed Miliband are also voicing serious concerns.

“Our messaging strategy is useless,” says one such henchman. “The danger is that the whole thing could rupture.” On the leader’s first day back, a fortnight of silence and drift culminated in an immigration speech that exemplified the party’s shortcomings. The most worrying aspect of Chris Bryant’s intervention was not the amateurish errors, but the convoluted message.

Voters failing to examine the text might infer that Labour has it in for both plutocrats and foreigners (with the exception of any Australian or American magus it might lure in to help it win the general election). Mr Bryant is hardly unique in wishing to combine a vision of a saintlier society with a bid to parry Lynton Crosby, the Prime Minister’s strategist. That is established party positioning, and it is failing.

Mr Crosby knows this playbook. It is called the “small target strategy” and it involves saying nothing to provoke an attack from the other side. The Australian Labour party deployed it in 2001, when they were deemed certain to win the election, only to be beaten by the Right, which, under Mr Crosby’s tutelage, used one simple, unscrupulous patriotic message.

Jon Cruddas, Labour’s policy reviewer, highlighted the “small target” danger early on, warning the leadership to shun a play-it-safe strategy. Yet Mr Miliband is still torn between excessive caution and quixotic fights, most recently with the unions. As voters switch off from the David v Goliath contests favoured by the leader, both foes and friends are starting to ask whether Mr Miliband has lost the plot.

The truth is that his story never had a plot-line. There was no precedent for a trounced Labour Party to bounce back into government in one term and no route maps for social democrats to navigate through a capitalist dystopia. Nor was Mr Miliband blessed with retinues of loyal disciples or greybeards. When David Miliband, hardly a megabeast, left for the US, one of the most senior shadow cabinet members said: “We are the grown-ups now.”

The nursery school politics on display this summer would surely lose Labour an election. With big figures, such as Ed Balls, in short supply and the Tories eager to portray Labour as a party of minibeasts, there are already signs that some major players have no intention of being consigned to the lepidoptera table.

Andy Burnham’s plea for boldness suggests not only a general frustration but a reminder to the two Eds that his bold ideas on raising extra money to pay for decent social care for the elderly would have to be spelt out long before the election. While a few colleagues take a dim view of Mr Burnham’s intervention, many are privately applauding his sense of urgency.

Senior loyalists are dismayed at how even committed Labour voters view the party as weak and directionless. “Our policies are neither organised nor clear,” says one frontbencher chafing, like many others, at being depicted as “timid or lazy” because they are not among the chosen few mandated to speak on the leadership’s behalf.

Despite such unease, Mr Miliband is not to be under-estimated. Once caricatured as a no-hope creature of the unions, he has proved to be modest, likeable, combative and impressive enough to put his battered party within reach of victory. Despite his shrinking poll lead and troubling evidence that Labour is losing trust on the economy, he could still pull off an overall majority. And yet, even allowing for summer hysteria, this is a critical moment for Mr Miliband. The four catalysts that could change his fortunes and see Labour back in power are time, turf, toughness and tenor.

On time, Miliband lieutenants are fond of stressing that his long game is geared to a five-year, fixed-term parliament and a fluid economy that permits no early pledges. “But people are desperate for an alternative now,” says one MP. Struggling voters, strangely resistant to calibrating their lives to Labour’s calendar, are unlikely to while away a trip to the food bank with the consoling thought that Mr Balls would reverse the bedroom tax now (but not necessarily in 2015) or that Mr Miliband is about to knock their socks off with his conference speech. He has the luxury of time; they haven’t.

On turf, Mr Miliband cannot ignore immigration or benefit reform. But since he is never going to outflank Mr Crosby on his chosen ground, he should focus on the terrain, already staked out, of abysmal pay (for Britons and incomers alike). In a hopeful start, he will be at a London market today, talking about living standards.Workers have seen their wages fall by 5.5 per cent since 2010, losing what Labour expects to be an average of £6,600 under the Tories.

When only the Netherlands, Greece and Portugal are doing worse, and when Britain is back-tracking to a neo-feudal world of seigneurial privilege and modern serfdom, Labour needs to produce some answers. If it is going to rein in zero-hours contracts, for example, or properly regulate the labour market, it should say exactly how. The rest is noise.

On toughness, Mr Miliband needs some cuts the Tories cannot match. Row back on Trident replacement. Promise a cheaper criminal justice system. As even US Republicans have discovered, closing prisons is a no-brainer in an age of falling crime.

On tone, Mr Miliband started well, absorbing Blue Labour’s sense of heritage and the American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s creed of social justice. But Aristotelian precepts for a good society, burnished in Harvard, have only taken Labour so far. In recent weeks, both the Governor of the Bank of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury have tackled the City’s role. If the appointees of God and Mammon can boldly espouse a better capitalism, then Labour fails at its peril to seize the mood for a more decent public realm. So, when the Tories send out go-home vans stigmatising immigrants, Labour should not be mumbling about gimmicks but warning in the starkest terms that the party will have no truck with vicious, mean-minded stunts that taint this country and all it stands for.

Mr Miliband, who has set great store in reaching out beyond Westminster, is likely to have deduced that, in order to win, it is now imperative for an Opposition of theorists to set out in a few clear promises what it would do in practice. Meanwhile, his party might reflect on Miracle Mike, who expired in a Phoenix motel soon after his second birthday. Headless chickens, of the avian or political variety, are rarely long for this world.